Comment by gorgoiler

Repl.it and children really helped me focus on the bits of computing that I loved, namely theoretical Computer Science and learning/teaching it through functional programming in small steps, in Python.

Then I ended up taking a job as a high school CS teacher. Being around the kids was a huge boost. It really helped me zone in on the joyful parts of discrete mathematical computation.

Ironically, over time being around the school itself (hugely conservative for many reasons, especially their IT) almost completely removed all that joy. Repl.it was such a positive experience that it’s not an understatement to say that it came to the rescue. It really did come along and the most perfect time for me, back in 2020.

Again, not everything was great. Seeing the effects of TikTok on children was pretty depressing. So too was seeing how disrespectful parents are towards teachers, compared to a generation or two ago. Teachers are servants of the parents’ staunch individualist whims, whereas my experience in my own and my peers’ upbringing was that they were deferred to as figures of authority.

Build yourself a ray tracer that renders ASCII art and you can drown out the troubles of the world. Similarly if you get a bunch of 14 year olds to do image edge detection in one page of code. Grade A escapism, all round.